SPLASH. BURBLE. PITTER-PATTER. PLOP.

“Did…did you see Lugubrious perform?” G’kolu asked.

Teal chuckled. “Yes. It was quite an act. She had a scaled replica of Jabba’s sail barge built—though it was so gaudy it’s hard to believe anything like it had ever existed. Inside the barge, the circus installed a fuzzy sandypede larva as a stand-in for Jabba the Hutt. Then Lugubrious leapt and tumbled and dashed about the model with a tiny glowing toothpick that she said was her lightsaber. She made high-pitched lightsaber noises to go with it.”

“Wow,” said G’kolu. “I wish I could have seen it.”

“I think they’d have banned you from the circus after the show,” Teal said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Let’s see….” Teal closed her eyes and concentrated. “You would have stayed behind to debate lightsaber dueling techniques with Lugubrious—”

“Oh, that would be fun! I could get a toothpick and practice with her—”

“That’s right. Imagine yourself jumping about the sail barge—”

“And imagine if Captain Tuuma instead of Jabba were on the barge? I’d swing my lightsaber like this—”

“And there, you’d have crushed the stage. Very smooth.”

“…”

“See? I know how you think.”

G’kolu tried to change the subject. “Would you…would you have wanted Lugubrious to live on you?”

“Um, no. But I can see—”

“Wait!” Flux broke in. “I think we’re moving out of the sludge!”

Indeed, the floor under their feet was slanting upward, lifting them out of the odorous slime. They had finally reached the raised platform in the bow of the ship. There, a round access port in the hull would be connected to the sewage pipes to drain the bilge once the Wayward Current docked in Canto Bight.

“Wish we had a little light,” Teal said. “Hey, what are those glowing things?”

A few maintenance droids zipped through the darkness, emitting a series of staccato clicks as the beams from their searchlights pierced the darkness.

“Maybe we should grab one of those to serve as a lamp,” said G’kolu.

G2-X beeped in warning. One of the maintenance droids swept toward the deckhands, and a bright bolt shot out, missing G’kolu’s astonished face by mere centimeters.

“Augh!” G’kolu jumped back into the sludge from the platform. “Quit it! What’s it doing shooting at us?”

“Their programming must have detected us as creatures that needed to be hunted—we’re vermin,” said Tyra.

The droids hovered in the fetid air, and their humming grew louder as their electric zappers charged up.

“Can’t we stop them?” asked Teal. She jumped out of the way as another bolt shot past her, ricocheting off the bulkheads.

“These things are nimble and deadly,” said Tyra. “They have to be, because the vermin that live in the bilge can get pretty big.”

“Except we’re not vermin!” said G’kolu.

G2-X beeped excitedly.

“No way. Nuh-uh. Absolutely not,” said Tyra.

G2-X beeped some more and whistled sharply for emphasis.

“What’s he suggesting?” asked Teal. “I only caught bits and pieces of that.”

Tyra sighed. “He says the rest of us need to dive into the sludge to act as bait, and he’ll take care of them for us.”

“Dive into the sludge? Is he out of—”

Another maintenance droid clicked loudly and swooped for Teal’s head. She managed to duck out of the way, barely, but the breeze from the spinning blades passed right over her scalp. She shuddered.

“All right,” said Flux, who was preternaturally calm. “It’s not a big deal. This slime is made up of the same substance as everything else in the universe.”

“You keep on telling yourself that,” said Teal. “But the rest of the universe doesn’t make my skin crawl.”

Flux ignored her. “It’s all part of the Tide. We just need to hold our breaths and dive in. If Luke can jump into the acid mines of the Deep, we can survive being under sewage for a while.” She took a few deep breaths, almost gagged, and then resolutely dove into the slimy sludge, burying herself completely.

Tyra, G’kolu, and Teal looked at each other, sighed, and followed suit.

The maintenance droids hovered over the sludge, trying to determine if the targets had drowned or were still active below the surface. Moving silently on his robber wheels, G2-X slowly approached. The lack of body heat emissions from his chassis caused the maintenance droids to ignore him as a threat.

When he judged he was close enough, G2-X burst into a frenzy of motion. He scooped up handfuls of mud from the bottom of the bilge with his manipulators and chucked them into the propellers and exhaust ports of the maintenance droids. As the surprised droids struggled to gain altitude, G2-X leapt onto them like a bird-catching foxcat and pressed them into the thick sludge. The propellers and maneuvering jets sputtered and choked as the droids put up a desperate struggle, but eventually they stopped moving.

The deckhands and the stowaway burst out of the slimy water, sputtering and gasping for air. They gagged and dry-heaved, but eventually they managed to catch their breaths.

G2-X hoisted one of the disabled maintenance droids like some kind of trophy. Its searchlight was still working, and G2-X hung it over the access port like a lamp. The custodian droid chirped proudly.

Teal wiped the mud off her face and spat in disgust. “I’m never doing that again.”

“I think you made us do that just to see how ridiculous we’d look,” said Tyra accusingly.

G2-X let out a noncommittal chirp.

“At least we’re safe for now,” said Flux. “Who knew that there would be a whole other world down here in the belly of the ship?”

The deckhands had to agree that the adventure was rather exciting.

The companions climbed out of the sludge onto the platform and tried to clean themselves off as best they could.

“We just have to wait until the ship docks and climb out of the sewage pipes,” said Teal.

“How long until that happens?” asked Flux.

“A few hours at least,” said Teal. “Once the customs inspection is over, the ship has to get into orbit and then glide down to the surface.”

“Time enough for one last story?” asked Tyra.

Teal turned to G’kolu. “You’re always full of tall tales.”

“Make it a Luke Skywalker story,” said Tyra. “Stay on theme.”

“Well,” said G’kolu, “now that you mention it, all this talk about finding a new world in the belly of the Wayward Current does remind me of a story. I once met a scientist from the University of Bar’leth who was possibly the strangest person I’ve ever known—”

“You didn’t look in the mirror this morning, did you?”

“Ha-ha. The scientist wanted to raise money for a research expedition to go inside giant space slugs.”

“What?”

“Why would you do that?”

“That’s such a strange idea!”

“That’s what everyone else said. But her reasons for exploring the space slugs also had something to do with Luke Skywalker….”